


Quid Pro Quo

by olly_octopus



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: First Kiss, Fluff, Get together fic, I’m back I’m sorry, M/M, and Crowley is a twat, and funny, and then they do, and they nearly kiss, asdfhgj so much fluff, its all very cute, olly makes constant jokes 2k19, really should have learnt by now but no, woop woop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-07 09:45:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19206868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/olly_octopus/pseuds/olly_octopus
Summary: “Angel,” Crowley purrs sweetly, voice dripping with temptation and all the sins of Hell that would make Gabriel violently throw up at the golden gates. “Angel, sweetheart, have I ever told you that your eyes are filled with all the stars in the heavens?”“Of course they are,” replies Aziraphale crossly. “I’m a celestial being, just below God herself. Where else would you expect to find the stars?”***Or, Crowley discovers the one angel he wants to flirt with also happens to be the one being in the universe that doesn’t really understand it. Fluff and awkwardness ensues.





	Quid Pro Quo

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve watched 2 episodes of this and I want it hooked into my veins also dan Howell came out and I think I’m dreaming

The day Crowley found out that Aziraphale had never been flirted with was some time in 1784, on a Wednesday. 

A bloody wet Wednesday, Crowley recalls now; one that makes you wake up in the morning frankly quite rudely early and then make you immediately groan rather loudly and throw a tantrum because you were Planning To Mow The Lawn. Luckily, Crowley doesn’t have a lawn now and certainly didn’t have one in 1784. However, he did have an angel, and that was almost as bothersome.

“Aziraphale, can’t we be reasonable? It was only a little fire; everyone’s fucking freezing their balls off anyway. I’m sure there’s squirrel somewhere that owes me it’s stupid squirrel life for not just letting it freeze to death.”  
“That’s— that’s not the POINT!!” Aziraphale looks flustered, remarkably so, and Crowley finds himself rather amused and fond of his stupid little cherub face not for the first time.  
“Angel,” Crowley groans, falling backwards into Aziraphale’s lap with all the grace in the world of a toddler on a sugar crash. “I’m a demon, it’s what we do, if you’re so upset with me I don’t at all see what’s stopping you from going and remedying a sodding burnt pan. It was funny; she kept complaining about the sauce not properly heating up and I helped her… give or take a singed kitchen and a pie shop that overcharged anyway.”

Aziraphale, who is clearly struggling for a place to put his hands considering his lap is being utilised by Crowley, decides to settle for putting one on the armrest of the gorgeous swish armchair embroidered with blue flowers and the other— admittedly reluctantly— just beside Crowley’s hair. For this century, it’s shoulder length and tied back and frustratingly attractive and Aziraphale is doing the absolute most to Not Think About It.

“I can’t,” he replies miserably.  
“You can. I’ve seen you— you and your bloody miracles.”  
“I can’t,” repeats Aziraphale. “You’re- you’re in my lap. Can’t get up.”

Crowley, the bastard, does nothing except make himself more comfortable.  
“Poor baby. I guess this is my permanent place of residence now.”  
Aziraphale just pouts. “I haven’t forgiven you.”

Crowley, who is perfectly content in the angel’s lap and extremely happy having his hair absent-mindedly played with (because Aziraphale Cannot Help Himself), tuts and decides that this simply will not do.  
“This simply will not do,” he says out loud, and the angel frowns.  
“What do you—“  
“Angel,” Crowley purrs sweetly, voice dripping with temptation and all the sins of Hell that would make Gabriel violently throw up at the golden gates. “Angel, sweetheart, have I ever told you that your eyes are filled with all the stars in the heavens?”  
“Of course they are,” replies Aziraphale crossly. “I’m a celestial being, just below God herself. Where else would you expect to find the stars?”

“What,” says Crowley.

Now, a normal person, with good morals and moderate understanding of right and wrong and naivety and experience, would have completely dropped this whole flirting thing immediately and dismissed it as a waste of time on someone who it clearly won’t work on.

Crowley, however, is a bastard. A bastard who is quite adept at not only fucking his way out of trouble but also flirting his way out of it, and who is at last faced with a problem that will be solved with neither of these.

He, who is most certainly Not a normal person, and is most certainly a bastard, looks at Aziraphale the angel who Does Not Understand Flirting, and thinks, essentially, “flirt harder”. 

***

The second time Crowley deliberately flirts with Aziraphale is a lovely sunny Saturday in 1955.

Of course, it should be clarified that Crowley has accidentally flirted with Aziraphale no less than 46832 times in the 6000 years they’ve known each other, depending on your definition of flirting, and really by now they should have either come to a sensible agreement to tone it down OR shagged like it’s the end of the world in a hotel room with good soundproof walls and a quid pro quo policy.

Nevertheless, one hundred and seventy one years later, here they are— this time at a sweet little garden centre cafe that serves cupcakes with edible roses on them. (Aziraphale is beyond transcendent.)  
“Are you not eating,” he says through a mouthful of buttercream.  
“No, can’t stomach all the sugar. Don’t mind it when it’s with something to counter it, but this? Just sickly. Don’t know how you can eat it.”  
“You don’t live,” announces Aziraphale, attention returning to the golden sponge.

And he’s got sodding crumbs round his mouth too.

Crowley can’t just reach across the table and brush them away, no matter how much he wants to, and Christ on a dildo does he want to. Fuckin— Cupid’s bow. Crumbs on his Cupid’s bow. He wants to kiss them away. He wants to fucking, to just bastarding kiss the angel. Kiss him on his stupid mouth. See beelzebub and Gabriel and all the powers that be just utterly shit their pants as he snogs this stupid little angel until he can’t remember whether he serves God or Frank Sinatra.

He doesn’t.

“Going for a new look, are you,” he drawls.  
“Excuse me?”  
Crowley gestures at his mouth. “Crumbs.”  
Aziraphale’s fingers rise as though to touch his own face, and Crowley makes a dismissive noise. “No, I’ll get them for you.”

Aziraphale nods nervously and smiles as Crowley reachers his long, piano-player’s fingers across the table to touch him, and the air between them seems to tense almost imperceptibly.  
“Um,” says the angel.  
“Huh,” says the demon.  
It’s a spinning moment, held steady by a hand frozen in midair and baby blue eyes locked with orange, maintaining the sweet balance in the universe between the light and the dark. Aziraphale almost seems to move closer.  
“Did you stop time?” He says suddenly, and then time crashes back into itself with a jolt that makes mountains move and makes the elderly woman in the corner drop her teacup.

“Oh, oh no, I’m so sorry—“ Aziraphale jumps to his feet at once, crippled with apologies for something that was arguably completely Crowley’s fault, leaning Crowley himself completely rigid in the place he’d been before time had the total indecency to start moving again.  
“Bugger,” he murmurs, realising his hand is still reaching out for a place when Aziraphale should be. “Bugger, bugger, bugger.”

He was close.

He was so close, tantalisingly close to kissing him. Kissing the angel. Defying everything he was expected to work for and throwing all caution and, if all went well, his clothes to the wind.

Bugger.

Crowley drops his hand and turns to look at where Aziraphale has miraculously managed to synthesise a fresh cup of tea out the air for the bewildered looking old woman and is now trying to convince her that the table leg just wobbled. Crowley snorts. That’s certainly one alternative to a demon accidentally stopping time because he wants to suck face that badly.

Bless Aziraphale and his stupid empathy.  
And bugger him.

***

The third time that Crowley sets out to flirt with the angel he hopes will be his last. Not because they’ll never flirt again, but because he’s reluctantly praying to the powers that be in hopes that the next time they flirt it’ll be in a healthy and sexually and spiritually satisfying relationship. So, he tries.

2011, now, a year where everything is not quite fucked over but if the baby he lately planted has anything to do with anything then it should be quite soon. Crowley figures that if the world is ending he might as well at least attempt to get some celestial dick before Armageddon happens.  
“Angel,” he starts out, and Aziraphale only hums in return. “Do you know something?”  
“Many things,” replies Aziraphale absently. “I’ve read most of the literature in the world and I like to think a good bit of general knowledge doesn’t go amiss.”  
“You might not know this.”  
“Intriguing, certainly.”

Crowley watches a young child struggle to pull a daffodil out the ground, and folds his arms before turning his eyes towards the heavens.  
“I think you’re really quite special.”  
“...What do you mean?”  
“Just… you,” sighs Crowley, and Aziraphale sits up a little straighter.  
“In what sense? I mean, as in the general layout of things and God's plan—“  
“No, you fuckwit, I mean you. You’re very beautiful. And idiotic, I suppose, and sweet and charming and charismatic and I sodding wank off to you so I should know.”

Well, thinks Crowley as Aziraphale’s face goes from politely curious to confused to astonished and then finally mortified. At least all the cards are on the table now.

“I’m not exactly charismatic, now, am I,” Aziraphale eventually mumbles.  
“You picked out that bit? From all of that? From what is probably the best poetry written in two hundred years?”  
“I thought I should clarify that bit first.”  
“You’re unbelievable.” Crowley squints at him. “And not the big where I called you beautiful? Or told you that sometimes I wake up at three in the morning and can’t think of anything but your bloody eyes and your mouth and your fucking little angelic button nose, for fucks sake—!”  
“No, no, I definitely don’t recall that second part,” Aziraphale says hurriedly. “I do however remember the bit where you said you, um, gratify yourself to me? On occasion?”  
“Oh, same thing. Although it’s harder at 3AM because I’m usually too tired to even attempt to find any sort of lubricant.”

Aziraphale gives a mortified squeak.

“Shocking, you are, absolutely shocking.”  
“You like it.”

Crowley gets to his feet. “Well, I told you what’s what, and if there’s nothing else to say I think I’ll bugger off home and drink until I can’t remember your face. Not that that would ever happen easily.” He’s about to turn and walk away when suddenly there’s a timid little, ‘wait,’ and a scuffling and Aziraphale’s standing looking rather determined and simultaneously petrified.

“I didn’t tell you the most important part. Of what I got from your speech, I mean.” He clears his throat. “I’ve loved you now for what might be coming up to one hundred and sixty years and in all that time I didn’t dare to think you’d love me the same way I loved you.”  
“Oh, Christ, Aziraphale—“  
“—and I want you to know that I think you are also beautiful and charming and monumentally stupid but I love you endlessly and promise to let you brush crumbs off my face if you’d like that.”

Crowley feels a warmth spread through his body, and tears prickle behind his eyes as the angel stands defiant and brave in front of him.  
“Would you like to know how long,” he whispers.  
“You’ll tell me anyway.”  
“Six thousand years. You and your fucking flaming sword and when the thunder came and your first reaction was to shelter me and I’m so endlessly bloody angry with you for waiting a hundred and sixty years longer than you needed to.”

When they kiss, it’s like a deal. 

You know, in the meetings you always see where two straight white men have a face off and a penis measuring contest to see who can assert the most dominance before finally shaking hands and cementing a bond that will last until one of them decides they objectively have the bigger penis and decides they’re going to take up the hobby of embezzlement.

It’s like that, except it completely isn’t because Aziraphale loves Crowley mind, body and soul and Crowley has done the same since Adam and Eve were first banished from Eden and when they kiss it’s with enough magnitude to stop the Earth’s rotation and make an old lady in a tea shop knock over a vase.

And, if they do afterwards find a hotel with a half-decent breakfast bar and staff that don’t ask questions, then that’s nobody’s business but their own— even if Gabriel does almost vomit all over the golden gates after deciding he should really check in on them. It’s his own fault, really.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading I definitely jumped on this bandwagon but do I regret it? never
> 
> @/ollyoctopus on tumblr


End file.
